> The fight between the two companies centers on a 2019 agreement to allow YouTube TV on Roku. Roku said Google demanded special access to search data from Roku customers as a condition of allowing YouTube TV on Roku devices. Roku also said Google asked for prioritized search results for YouTube videos in Roku's search feature.
> Roku said it agreed to those terms, but also asked that Google not ask for any additional data. Google would not commit to that, according to Roku, and now both sides are at an impasse. Unless both companies come to an agreement before Dec. 9, YouTube's apps will disappear from Roku's app store.
Both sides of the agreement are likely being deceptive in their statements. Google says they never asked for preferential treatment of search, nor access to user data[0],
yet Roku says they did.
Google denies that they made this request, but recently revealed emails indicate that they did make a request along those lines.
Regardless of this deal, Roku is almost certainly dead in the water. They have limited international penetration and their platform, if you can call it one, is extremely limited compared to Apple, Google, and even Amazon’s offerings and app stores.
I don’t see a path forward at this point for the company. They will continue to have a stream of ad revenue for awhile, but will slowly get squeezed out.
I don't see any evidence that Roku is taking 30% of anything. Roku does not require users to use its own payment system for subscriptions of streaming services, including subscriptions initiated from within the channel.
"brand-specific buttons on its remote controls... $1 per customer for each button ... Roku doesn’t pay anything to the channels it distributes, yet it still takes a share of their ad revenue. ... Roku executives will threaten to cancel a channel if its owner doesn’t give Roku a larger cut of ad sales" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-11/streaming...
It's mostly that I despised the way that, fundamentally, plex was in control of what user saw when they first logged in. They kept adding bs and less technical users kept feeling like the rug was pulled out from under them when a bunch of stuff would change.
Jellyfin doesn't give me the control I'd like to have, but it does give me what I consider essential. This may improve when the team transitions to a from-scratch web client[1] rather than the forked-from-emby client.
Not a Plex user but I switched from Kodi because I've always hated Kodi's UI, and just suffered it for lack of anything better (no, alternative skins don't help, both because most of them are half-broken, and because most of what I dislike seems to be baked into the essential structure of their UI).
Gone back and forth between it and just running a simple desktop with VLC connected to a TV, for many years.
Happy Jellyfin user for... oh, two or three years now. I use it with the Roku app, and sometimes in a browser.
It's got some rough edges, but nothing like Kodi.
One thing I really like is that I can just run it directly on my file server. An absolute breeze to get it running in Docker. I'm a very lazy sysadmin when I'm on my own time, so I've even been relying on Docker to handle restarts and such—didn't touch Systemd at all. This isn't exactly best practice but I get it "for free" and it's yet to fail. If it does, well, it's not like it's a big deal. Kodi samba shares to play remote media have always sucked to set up, but this instead provides an API for clients to browse and then stream one video remotely—the clients don't need any form of actual access to the files (I think there are ways to set Kodi up like that, too, so you've got it two places and one's just playing media from the other, but the last thing I wanted was even more complexity in my Kodi set-up and config process)
Being able to hop on a browser anywhere and edit config and media metadata is so very much nicer than trying to do it on a TV. The in-browser UI's also pretty damn good for watching stuff.
I haven't tried it, but I understand there's a plugin for Kodi that lets you play your Jellyfin library through it. If I ever set up Kodi again, for some reason, that's exactly what I'll do. No "native" file access in Kodi, just a thin frontend for Jellyfin.
Somewhere on my long list of shit I'll never actually get around to doing is writing a Jellyfin browser & player "core" for Retroarch. Now that would be perfect.
[EDIT] Oh, I like its account management way better than Kodi's, too. Very easy to configure (through the browser, like nearly everything else). My kids have access to one set of content, my wife and I each have an account with access to everything, so our "watched" statuses don't interfere for stuff we watch on our own time. It's great.
Jellyfin is a completely open source and community driven fork of Emby, which was a rebrand of "Media Browser" way back in the day.
Plex is just creepy, doing things like requiring you to sign up and log in through their web portal instead of using the local plex server. Even before the [onslaught of money put into it recently](https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/14/plex-raises-50m-growth-rou...) Plex did weird things requiring you to ping their servers. I imagine this is going to increase tenfold over the next few years. Gotta hit those KPI's after all.
Overall, Jellyfin does not have the shine that Plex has. As a user of Jellyfin since day 1, it is getting better and better every day. At this point, the only platform that doesnt have a Jellyfin app that I really wish it did was PlayStation.
It's been a while, but I remember running into lots of weird playback and subtitle issues with Plex, like the media getting stuck when I would pause it etc. It felt very bloated. Jellyfin on the other hand has worked like a charm out of the box so far.
Now that you mention it I tend to get the occasional buffering issue too. My main usecase for plex is sharing my library with my friends, does jellyfin have an easy way of doing that?
Thanks for sharing this!
Recently started using youtube-dl's built in channel scraping but it is clunky and slow.
Few months ago ads on youtube app on Roku went from aprx 1 per 10 minutes to every 3 minutes.
Had enough of that and started scraping my subscriptions to Plex
Jellyfin user, this looks very much like something I've wanted. How's Jellyfin do with finding metadata for these sorts of files? Getting the full title, date published, grouping by creator, anything like that? I'm pretty sure TVDB has listings for some long-running and fairly famous Youtube series, but it'd be nicer to have a general solution that worked for any Youtube video that Jellyfin finds. Plus getting it to find Youtube video metadata by TVDB entry would probably require some manual filename & folder structure editing.
There needs to be ways ensuring that content remains a commodity and does not enable rent-seeking. Imagine where we would be today if each television station had it's own antenna and encoding just to seek more profit.
Wait what? Content has never been a commodity and copyright is by definition rent-seeking just without the negative connotations.
You might mean content distribution but that's really never been a commodity either. Even though it sorta kinda feels like you can buy "cable" from lots of companies that's only because each company independently negotiated contracts for all their channels. Physical distribution -- B&N/Blockbuster/Record Stores (and OG DVD Netflix) is the closest thing you could call commodity content distribution.
But we kinda ruined open internet distribution early early on with DRM and locked-down clients which put platform owners in a similar spot to cable companies and so here we are.
> copyright is by definition rent-seeking just without the negative connotations
> But we kinda ruined open internet distribution early early on with DRM and locked-down clients
DRM is nothing more than an enforcement mechanism for existing copyright though. So that's a bit like saying "copyright is a great thing as long as it only exists on paper".
Both of these generally break the TOS of YouTube[0], which means Roku distributing such software could be considered breaking the CFAA and/or helping their customers do so. Besides that, Roku isn't some small OSS project - their previous deal with YouTube likely means Google could revel in having real damages to bring against Roku for lost ad revenue during the entire time the YouTube app was removed and replaced with a version that doesn't show ads or shows less relevant ads.
So Google will have to tell their users to side-load the app on the Roku. Just like anyone booted from the Android App store. (yes, the Roku does have sideloading, though you can sideload only one app at a time.).
I've been waiting for a device to smarten up my TVs so the kids can stream on it but without YouTube. If google goes through with this I will buy some Rokus :)
Just out of curiosity, and feel free to ignore this question if you’d rather not say, but why something specifically without YouTube, but presumably other streaming apps?
The crap that's on YouTube makes the cable TV networks targeted at kids look like educational television. Horrid stuff with kids shooting off their mouths.
It's pretty reasonable, and smart I'd say. The kids content on YouTube has been heavily gamed by content farms optimizing content for SEO, making absolutely bizarre and sometimes disgusting content.
Bit of a lengthy watch, but this video is pretty eye-opening:
Search for a period (just ".") and pick any of the things youtube recommends (don't press enter on your "." query). These are the kinds of videos it tends to suggest to kids. Someone else posted a detailed explanation on why but tldr is that kids are curious about things that they don't understand and adults exploited this curiosity.
Edit: And also this trick is known by a lot of kids according to a friend I have that works at a public school
Like everybody else here said, YouTube is the wild west with zero content curation and shit moderation. My 4 year old loved this gaming channel on my one smart TV with a YouTube app, I saw a few episodes with him and it was all normal gamer stuff with reactions. Now I banned him from watching YouTube because that channel started doing reviews of games inspired by Squid Game (if you haven't watched it, it's essentially violence porn)
I had the same problem with my elder kid, YouTube is to kids what Facebook is to the aging population and Tiktok is to teens, an uncurated poison. But kids lack the ability to filter their own content, and YouTube makes no effort to curate. He complains he can't watch it anymore but when I stream kid-appropriate content from the other streaming platforms he'll watch it without further complaint
Roku could do the world a favor by featuring newer alternate video sharing platforms, particularly decentralized ones. It could also make it clear why they’re offering them and rally users to their support.
The article says this is "the latest battle between a Big Tech giant and a smaller technology firm." Roku is a technology spin-off of Netflix that went public on its own and last year reported revenue of nearly a billion dollars.
Sure, Roku is "smaller" than Google, but I disagree with the characterization of Roku as some poor upstart that's getting ground underfoot by Big Tech.
I'm certainly looking forward to it. There's good content for kids on youtube, but it's drowning in a sea of low quality or downright creepy imitations, and I don't think the algorithm can tell the difference. And the ads aren't much better.
Too bad - after the YouTube app had silently disappeared from my Apple TV, I had to dig up my ancient Roku so I could continue to enjoy it. A mini-PC to the rescue, I guess…
67 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] thread> The fight between the two companies centers on a 2019 agreement to allow YouTube TV on Roku. Roku said Google demanded special access to search data from Roku customers as a condition of allowing YouTube TV on Roku devices. Roku also said Google asked for prioritized search results for YouTube videos in Roku's search feature.
> Roku said it agreed to those terms, but also asked that Google not ask for any additional data. Google would not commit to that, according to Roku, and now both sides are at an impasse. Unless both companies come to an agreement before Dec. 9, YouTube's apps will disappear from Roku's app store.
It'd be nice if they thought of the users they'd be affecting, but I guess in a way they are, in that they're upset they can't mine those users.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28945280
also see[]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28945250
Regardless of this deal, Roku is almost certainly dead in the water. They have limited international penetration and their platform, if you can call it one, is extremely limited compared to Apple, Google, and even Amazon’s offerings and app stores.
I don’t see a path forward at this point for the company. They will continue to have a stream of ad revenue for awhile, but will slowly get squeezed out.
Most cheap smart tvs come with roku OS. I wouldn't call that limited penetration.
Roku help page for Apple TV channel: https://support.roku.com/article/360036652634
> If you subscribe to any Apple TV Channels, payment will be charged to your Apple ID account at purchase.
Apple TV channel listing on Roku: https://channelstore.roku.com/details/a20e3c294993147c6cda43...
"brand-specific buttons on its remote controls... $1 per customer for each button ... Roku doesn’t pay anything to the channels it distributes, yet it still takes a share of their ad revenue. ... Roku executives will threaten to cancel a channel if its owner doesn’t give Roku a larger cut of ad sales" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-11/streaming...
Roku tells customers it is unable to strike a deal with YouTube -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28943886
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21986282 (2 years ago)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28664802 (1 month ago)
It's mostly that I despised the way that, fundamentally, plex was in control of what user saw when they first logged in. They kept adding bs and less technical users kept feeling like the rug was pulled out from under them when a bunch of stuff would change.
Jellyfin doesn't give me the control I'd like to have, but it does give me what I consider essential. This may improve when the team transitions to a from-scratch web client[1] rather than the forked-from-emby client.
[1] https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-vue
Gone back and forth between it and just running a simple desktop with VLC connected to a TV, for many years.
Happy Jellyfin user for... oh, two or three years now. I use it with the Roku app, and sometimes in a browser.
It's got some rough edges, but nothing like Kodi.
One thing I really like is that I can just run it directly on my file server. An absolute breeze to get it running in Docker. I'm a very lazy sysadmin when I'm on my own time, so I've even been relying on Docker to handle restarts and such—didn't touch Systemd at all. This isn't exactly best practice but I get it "for free" and it's yet to fail. If it does, well, it's not like it's a big deal. Kodi samba shares to play remote media have always sucked to set up, but this instead provides an API for clients to browse and then stream one video remotely—the clients don't need any form of actual access to the files (I think there are ways to set Kodi up like that, too, so you've got it two places and one's just playing media from the other, but the last thing I wanted was even more complexity in my Kodi set-up and config process)
Being able to hop on a browser anywhere and edit config and media metadata is so very much nicer than trying to do it on a TV. The in-browser UI's also pretty damn good for watching stuff.
I haven't tried it, but I understand there's a plugin for Kodi that lets you play your Jellyfin library through it. If I ever set up Kodi again, for some reason, that's exactly what I'll do. No "native" file access in Kodi, just a thin frontend for Jellyfin.
Somewhere on my long list of shit I'll never actually get around to doing is writing a Jellyfin browser & player "core" for Retroarch. Now that would be perfect.
[EDIT] Oh, I like its account management way better than Kodi's, too. Very easy to configure (through the browser, like nearly everything else). My kids have access to one set of content, my wife and I each have an account with access to everything, so our "watched" statuses don't interfere for stuff we watch on our own time. It's great.
Plex is just creepy, doing things like requiring you to sign up and log in through their web portal instead of using the local plex server. Even before the [onslaught of money put into it recently](https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/14/plex-raises-50m-growth-rou...) Plex did weird things requiring you to ping their servers. I imagine this is going to increase tenfold over the next few years. Gotta hit those KPI's after all.
Overall, Jellyfin does not have the shine that Plex has. As a user of Jellyfin since day 1, it is getting better and better every day. At this point, the only platform that doesnt have a Jellyfin app that I really wish it did was PlayStation.
EDIT: So there is a companion Jellyfin app for Roku
https://github.com/meeb/tubesync
I felt that keeping it in Jellyfin and grabbing metadata using https://github.com/ankenyr/jellyfin-youtube-metadata-plugin was nicer. Plus way more client support than just a web browser.
https://github.com/bbilly1/tubearchivist
You might mean content distribution but that's really never been a commodity either. Even though it sorta kinda feels like you can buy "cable" from lots of companies that's only because each company independently negotiated contracts for all their channels. Physical distribution -- B&N/Blockbuster/Record Stores (and OG DVD Netflix) is the closest thing you could call commodity content distribution.
But we kinda ruined open internet distribution early early on with DRM and locked-down clients which put platform owners in a similar spot to cable companies and so here we are.
> But we kinda ruined open internet distribution early early on with DRM and locked-down clients
DRM is nothing more than an enforcement mechanism for existing copyright though. So that's a bit like saying "copyright is a great thing as long as it only exists on paper".
(1) These are alternative YouTube clients that block youtube ads, and STN even has sponsorblock.
0: https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms#:~:text=circum... "Permissions and Restrictions" (2)
Bit of a lengthy watch, but this video is pretty eye-opening:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKp2gikIkD8
(It's a few years old at this point, but not a lot has changed, and possibly has gotten worse)
Edit: And also this trick is known by a lot of kids according to a friend I have that works at a public school
My kids never cried for Netflix, Hulu, or Disney+, but when I banned YouTube they CRIED.
I had the same problem with my elder kid, YouTube is to kids what Facebook is to the aging population and Tiktok is to teens, an uncurated poison. But kids lack the ability to filter their own content, and YouTube makes no effort to curate. He complains he can't watch it anymore but when I stream kid-appropriate content from the other streaming platforms he'll watch it without further complaint
Sure, Roku is "smaller" than Google, but I disagree with the characterization of Roku as some poor upstart that's getting ground underfoot by Big Tech.
Doing a thing, getting called out, and then lying - only to get bitten by a leaked paper trail is such a Microsoft thing to do.
It basically cured my kid’s addiction to YT’s junk/addictive content for young kids.
I’m sure this so benefit at least some people in a similar fashion.
Disclaimer: Haven't tried this yet.